Whether it is Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, or Pintrest, just about everyone I meet has some kind of social media profile. Even if it is as simple as an Instagram account (which my mom even has now), it is virtually impossible to talk to anyone that isn’t connected via the web. With so many people tweeting, posting, and sharing, these social websites are so interlinked and there is so much activity that it is impossible to ignore the weight of authority on the internet these days.

There are so many links going in and out of these massive social sites that Google knows and understands people trust and use them. The more trust that Google and other search engines see in a website, the more they are going to rank those sites in their searches when relevant. So if you are a business owner, it makes sense that you would want to have some of these profiles for your business. This is a great way to not only engage your customers and give them a sense of trust and brand awareness, it is a great way to keep them coming back to your business through promotions or reviews.

You see, people trust other people whether they want to admit it or not. If they search for something and see that a business got a ton of great reviews from other people, they are more likely to think that they should like that business too.

The other great reason to have some social profiles is so that you can have some authority in the search engines. When you have active profiles like a Yelp or Facebook page, you can potentially rank that page as well as your website and a video on the first page of Google which will give a lot of exposure to your business with the people that are already in the market to buy your product or service.

So, with so many different social media platforms available out there, how do you decide which ones are going to benefit you the most with your seo efforts? The easiest way to decide on the profiles that you should use is to just do a Google search for your main keywords and see what is ranking already. Google will tell you what is already working. Search through the first few pages and see what shows up already. Most of the time it will be Yelp and Facebook, but you may discover a few new ones that you didn’t even know existed.

Setting up all of these social profiles can be time consuming and they have to be set up properly in order for them to do you much good. Hiring an Austin SEO expert for local Austin social media marketing can be very beneficial to save yourself time and actually provide a very high ROI when you can start to dominate the whole first page of Google with these social profiles, pushing out your competition completely.

Here are some of the tools I use to do research on websites and social profiles: